Who am I?

I’m a, blogger and event/marketing/media consultant.
Blogging since 2002 and online since 1993 (I still remember my
Compuserve account number), I live in North London with my husband and
toddler, but was born in Cheadle.

Current interests: the planet, healthy living, cooking, Art Deco
ceramics, all flavours of CSI, sensible financial planning, social
media, virtual worlds and the arts in general. All this may change: a
woman’s prerogative, after all.

Random Linguistic Rambling

I find myself talking a strange pan-global semi-American
proto-valley-girl argot. And I don't like it.

I ask for the check in restaurants. I want to get things; like
the check, when I know I should have them. And I use get to mean
understand; I get that. You get that? I say cool far too often. I say
hey instead of hi. I occasionally say subway instead of tube. I ask
people how they're doing, not how they are. I say like, like, far
too often; I have friends who can verify that. And occasionally, I even
find myself speaking with high-rise-terminals (where sentence endings go
up instead of down, like a surprisingly good investment).

Aside: even the phrase "find myself" is a strange one. I mean, you
don't really find yourself anywhere, do you? You pro-actively go there,
make it happen. It has the implication of a passive life which happens
to you whilst you're watching TV or surfing the web. In my first job -
an ad agency, it was the eighties - one of the account managers, Alex, a
proto-grunge guy with a serious party habit, would roll into work at ten
thirty each morning, saying "I found myself in this woman's bed
in Chelsea…" At that time I was a paler-shade of virginal and was
shocked, not least by the frequency with which he, er, found himself in
these situations.

Other language tics: sometimes I even say yay. Or bah. Or duh. And I
definitely write them. Or other cartoon-enabled un-words that seem to
express emotion to my more wired or comic-geek friends at least.

I wonder if in the future there won't be accents and local variations
and dialects and patois; the world will be divided into the have-moderns
and the have-nots. People with access to culture and information (the
whole of the wired world) will speak a generic post-Hollywood
vernacular, without the nuances of regionality that belie background,
education and interests.

Online writing's taking it's toll too; there's a slightly subversive,
slightly informal way that people write now. I think I was always like
that, but I got update patches by osmosis from hanging out too much on
metafilter and with developer-types. It's a tone that says; we of the
open-source generation are all one. We respect each other, but in a
let-me-forward-you-that joke way. And to get respected in our borderless
world, a place without any genuine barriers to entry apart from net
access, you have to speak our language.

Come the revolution, are we all going to speak an Esperanto-like,
unmodified language that'll probably be called
Diet-Coke-Big-Mac-AOL-speak? Lexipraxis will be a quirky,
entertainment-value habit of former generations. The ability to weave
words into new fabrics of meaning will be frowned upon. There'll be
language validators; I'll be able to mail an MP3 of four random
conversations to the W3C Speak 4.6 site and they'll send me back a code
that I can attach to all electronic communication to verify that I speak
blandly.

How great will that be? Then we'll all have to dress in a Gap-Person
commeth kind of way and the world will be complete. Completely bereft of
individuality, eccentricity, idiosyncrasy and the values I hold
dear.